Suchergebnisse

The recently adopted Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA) is framed as a milestone for the EU Green Industrial Plan and the twin green and digital transitions. In the context of emerging green industrial policies and the resurgence of the state as an economic actor, the Act encapsulates the EU's attempt to instrumentalise markets for public objectives. Yet, the bid to generate tailored and specific market outcomes is undercut by the Act's primary strategy of adjusting risks and returns for ultimately volatile, profit-driven private initiative. At the same time, the Act's focus on domestic green growth, even if read charitably, remains myopic to the global challenge of climate change and perpetuates existing patterns of core-periphery extractivism.

The Greek election results of Sunday 21 May 2023 had a seismic effect, with many commentators juxtaposing them to the elections of 2015, when Syriza's dramatic victory marked the overhaul of the pre-crisis political system. This time, the circle of crisis politics is said to be complete. Syriza's devastating defeat with a margin just above 20% supposedly marks the end of a polarized era and the desire to return to 'mainstream politics'. These elections made clear that there is currently no articulated, alternative vision of social ordering that could inspire and successfully challenge the current constellation of social forces.

This article purports to show how the postmodern tenets of particularity, reflexivity, decentralization, and pluralism map on to current legal forms and structures of market regulation. This is the case in the regulatory paradigm of shaping markets "from within," the aspiration of which is to embed public and social values in the operations of private corporate actors, while expanding private corporate actors' regulatory authority and scope of self-governance. As the state attempts to harness the regulatory potential of the social sphere to impose sanctions for corporate misconduct, the role of the law becomes to facilitate the permeability of private institutional structures to the pressures of the market and civil society - in short, law relies on and seeks to facilitate societal self-regulation. This mutation of the function of law reifies the asymmetries of social power in legal arrangements, while it eventually weakens the role of democratic politics as the principle of social ordering. At the same time, such new forms of market regulation do not challenge the structural inequalities encased in the original institutional setup of public and private legal infrastructure and thus fail to reconstitute market dynamics. The article questions the potential of the postmodern focus on particularity and pluralism to provide normative orientation for socially transformative projects against the backdrop of diffused private power, eventually attempting to trace new directions of critique at the intersection of law and political economy.

This article traces a transition in the aspirations of social justice on global scale. The 'welfare world' vision of global justice, as it was captured most prominently by the proposals for a New International Economic Order in the mid-1970s, is contrasted with the contemporary ambitions of 'supply chain ethics', which seek to infuse transnational corporations with social responsibilities. These visions differ drastically in their ambitions, their epistemologies, and the role they reserve for the state but share a structural outlook on issues of social justice. Following the theme of the Special Issue, the shortcomings and the potential of the current supply chain ethics agenda in addressing the 'human problems' associated with corporate irresponsibility are reviewed. The paper suggests that mediating between structure and agency in a way that recontextualises the democratic principle is necessary to challenge power asymmetries in global regimes of production.

The aspiration of this article is to start a conversation about the possible contribution of a Law and Political Economy research agenda in Europe. I first unpack the role of law in structuring the economy at the supranational level by examining the legacy of ordoliberalism and the Economic Constitution of the EU as the normative project of insulating the internal market from political contestation. I then attempt to map the critical approaches that challenge the depoliticization of the economy and constitute the backdrop for an emerging LPE agenda. In particular, I discuss negative universalism, which focuses on the legal form as a limit to power and as enabling particular causes to make claims in universal terms; instrumentalism, which favors politicizing the law to advance egalitarian agendas; and counter-hegemony, which looks to civil society and to social transformation beyond the state. Concluding with a call for pragmatic and contextual critical practice, I attempt to carve out a space for an LPE in Europe agenda rooted in the normative commitment to democracy and equality as a form of immanent critique, in the aspiration to use institutions for social transformation, and in an orientation towards democratic power-building.

Ellen Hertz's manifold critique of corporate social responsibility (CSR) paradoxically begins by establishing common ground with the ardent defender of free market capitalism and an otherwise political opponent to her normative framework, Milton Friedman. Building on his analytical framework, according to which corporations and government operate on different principles, Hertz reinforces the idea that CSR cannot and should not replace democratic mechanisms in the determination of the public interest. In addition, following established critiques of CSR (e.g., Shamir 2008), Hertz highlights that CSR introduces the logics of the market in areas traditionally governed by different logics of action, while it also serves to obfuscate relations of power and to shape global governance in corporate-friendly directions.

AbstractThis article frames whistleblowers as regulatory intermediaries who provide a response to the problem posed by the fragmentation of knowledge in a complex society and market economy. I identify two ways in which whistleblowers become regulatory intermediaries: The first is by remedying informational asymmetries between the regulator and the target (instrumental approach). Both in the United States and in the European Union, whistleblowers are protected on the basis of the value of the disclosed information for the advancement of regulatory objectives. The second way in which whistleblowers become regulatory intermediaries is by contributing to the development of "communities of compliance" and by enhancing the internal self‐regulatory capacities of regulatory targets (reflexive approach). Creating internal channels of reporting and monitoring is perceived as a way to change the organizational culture of targets. Through the instrumentalism – reflexivity dipole, competing rationales and normative visions of regulatory intermediation become apparent: It could, on the one hand, facilitate state intervention and legal sanctions or, on the other hand, signal the aspiration to embed public and social values in private actors.

The gradual introduction of whistleblowing protection in the fields of financial and corporate regulation in the US and the EU is contrasted by a lack of provisions and a prosecutorial approach for whistleblowers in national security. The hypothesis of a dualism in the legal reception of the phenomenon of whistleblowing structures the fundamental research question of my doctoral research, which is how the role of whistleblowing in contemporary society can be conceptualized from a legal perspective. Is whistleblowing a human right, an aspect of freedom of expression? Or is whistleblowing an instrument of regulation? A major conclusion that I drew from the comparative legal framework of whistleblowing protection in the US and the EU is that whistleblowing is institutionalized primarily as a regulatory instrument, rather than as an extension of labour or civil rights. In the US, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 and the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 established a paradigm whereby the whistleblowers' protection from retaliation is subsumed under the broader goal of detecting and remedying systemic threats to market integrity. This meant an absolute emphasis on the procurement of information for cases of securities law violations or fraud against shareholders, as well as the lack of subjective requirements, such as good faith, for the whistleblowers. While the Sarbanes-Oxley act prioritized internal reporting mechanisms within the corporation, the Dodd-Frank Act followed a model of reporting wrongdoing directly to the regulatory agency, coupled with hefty monetary rewards for valuable information. The oscillation between less or more interfering policies highlights the dependence of whistleblowing protection mechanisms on the political economy and the level of trust placed on financial self-regulation. The European model of whistleblowing protection showcases important signs of convergence with the US. The first pan-European framework for whistleblowing protection came also in the field of market abuse. The Directive 2015/2392 ...